CY@CY Says Welcome to my dreamscape. Where a Lim is also a Ling.
Two sisters’ apparent double suicide in central China recently highlights the tragic consequences of traditional favouritism shown to sons.
A 17-year-old girl and her 10-year-old sister died in a double suicide after an argument with their 12-year-old brother over food. In a note written by the elder sister, the fight over the food with their brother was the last straw for her and hoped her parents would forgive her.
Many of us would just shrug off the tragedy as something unrelated to us. But if you care to look around you, you will find that the traditional favouritism shown to sons is very much alive even in Sarawak.
Treating children equally
Chinese’s preference for sons stretches back for centuries and has resulted in infanticide and the abandonment of girl babies. The advent of ultrasound scans has further exacerbated the situation as it allows people to abort female foetuses.
All parents hope that their children will be filial to them when they are old. Filial piety is highly valued in Asian cultures and this is one of the reasons why sons are favoured in Asian cultures. Sons and their children keep the surnames of the fathers whereas the children of daughters bear the surnames of their daughters’ husbands. But ironically daughters often end up more filial than sons.
Despite the old Chinese proverb that says women hold up half the sky, there are still quite a lot of Chinese families preferring having sons over daughters. In such families, daughters are relegated to second class family members while sons are treated as the supreme sex. Sons get the best of everything while daughters have to be content with playing second fiddle. We have advanced to an era of high tech and artificial intelligence and yet such bias against daughters still prevails.
It’s high time for parents to wake up and treat sons and daughters alike. Don’t regret when tragedies strike as a result of favouritism towards sons. Your daughters are watching you. Listen to your conscience, not some centuries-old belief.